Three Biloxi teams - two at Biloxi High and one at Beauvoir Elementary - have won top honors from among more than 1,500 teams participating in the Mississippi Stock Market game.

A team of Biloxi High School students has won a trip to Wall Street after finishing first in the Mississippi Stock Market Game, and a team from Beauvoir Elementary School won the statewide elementary division, picking up a check for $150. The stock market game combines a stock-trading simulation with classroom curriculum for students in Grades 4-12.

The winning team of Biloxi High students Caesar Reese, Ryan Jones, Erik Gabriel and Cassie Fambro turned a hypothetical $100,000 into $136,758.11 total equity, a portfolio that outperformed the S&P 500 index by nearly 40 percent.

At Beauvoir Elementary, a three-person team - fourth grader Mya Coleman, and sixth graders Tyler Cravens and Mackenzie Hunt - outpaced the S&P 500 by more than 24 percent.

Placing third in the spring stock market game high school division was a Biloxi High team of Ryan Cartier, Zachary Goundas and D'Shaun Lanier.

The formal announcements will be made during a luncheon in Jackson on Thursday.

The 15-week exercise teaches and reinforces such essential skills and concepts as critical thinking, decision-making, cooperation and communication, independent research, and saving and investing.

"They have to research companies and make sound decisions based upon their research as to how they will invest their money," said Biloxi High School economics teacher Todd Boucher, who requires his students to participate in the real-world educational project. "This is a team effort and they have to make many decisions as a group about what stocks to buy, when to sell them and whether or not they need to hang on to them. As is done in real investing, the students are required to pay fees, albeit hypothetical fees, for every transaction."

Teacher Kim Clemons directed the Beauvoir team. Said Clemons: "My CREATE students became very savvy about the stocks they purchased. They were very diligent about checking on their stock results everyday, even though I was only with them one day a week, and they purchased and sold shares depending on their P/E ratios, history of the stocks performance during the previous year, and their current history. They also diversified, purchasing stocks from a variety of countries and industries around the world."

The Stock Market Game is an educational program of the Foundation for Investor Education, an affiliate of the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association. The game program provides a variety of classroom curricula and other educational resources in support of its online investment simulation.

Since its introduction in 1976, the SMG program has helped more than 10 million students nationally and internationally learn how financial markets work and about their role in those markets.

In Mississippi, the Stock Market Game is administered and managed by the Mississippi Council on Economic Education.